Glade Festival - Fire Trees in Mud

The second to last weekend in July was quite eventful for much of England in general and for me in particular.

On Friday the 20th people all over the south woke up to serious floods; it had started to rain heavily late the night before, and many areas ended up deep under water or covered in mud; part of a motorway disintegrated! I was at the Glade festival at the time, and I've never seen a festival come so close to floating away on a tide of mud. People seemed to take it all in their stride, but it was almost unbelievable.

Anyway, I was at the festival with my eldest son, him to party with friends and me to shoot panoramas for myself and the festival organisers. And party with my son too of course. Because it wasn't easy staying upright I didn't shoot very many panos, but this dynamic sculptural installation was unmissable!

It was a set of tree-like twisted pipes that emitted smoke from various ends of branches and gouts of fire from their tops. It was a full-on flame-and-smoke lightshow, being operated live as part of the lightshow for one of the nearby stages. It would have been surreal enough on its own - but to experience this at late dusk while walking through a sea of mud between intense soundfields? Wow...

I'm now in touch with the artist, and I'll be capturing more of his festival installations this coming summer.

(And the reason why that weekend was particularly eventful for me? I got a phonecall at midday on Friday from my wife, telling me our house had just been hit by lightning! All's well now, but what a strange day that was...)

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Europe / UK-England

Lat: 51° 22' 20.1" N
Long: 2° 11' 13.3" W

Elevation: 87m

→ maps.google.com [EXT]

Precision is: High. Pinpoints the exact spot.

Fuji S5Pro, Nikkor 10.5mm lens, 360Precision Absolute pano head, basic but strong Calumet tripod